Mornings After

Mornings after a big night out are always thrilling.  Drug Skinny sent this to me the day after our shoot on Friday night.  Wasted youth.  Etc.  I felt bad just staying up late working at the computer.  I looked worse Saturday morning, too.  I always look worse than this.  I hope she never will.

I never really liked staying up late, even when I was in college.  My roommate and I would go downtown on a Saturday night and hang around outside some bar talking shit to one another and to anyone we might recognize.  Sometimes we'd gather a little crowd of shit talkers leaning against the wall, standing on one leg, the other on the wall for balance, stoop shouldered, hands in pockets, looking down, cool cats one and all.

Until around midnight.

Once in awhile we would go into the bar.  It would be a special occasion.  Something had to be happening, usually an exceptional band or maybe a beautiful girl or two.  Either way, we would just sit back and marvel, basking in the glow of aesthetic greatness, passing sideways glances like little boys who caught a peek of their friend's older sister walking in a towel from her bedroom to the bathroom.

But I don't want to undersell it.  I mean. . . we were cool.  And we were known in our famous college town.  Not for hanging out in bars necessarily, though if you'd seen us, you'd know what I mean, but for our prowess on the basketball courts.  We were gym rats and played for hours every day.  And we were hippies with hair falling down our backs.  We played in a sea of jocks, of frat boys and college athletes.  We'd play to piss them off.  Our secret was that we were small and slow.  Like an old white man in slippers.  But we were smart and knew the game and played skilled team ball, and I think they would just fall asleep.  We won and won and won, even against teams much more talented.  It was stupid good fun.

Maybe it made us tired.  I don't know.  But anything after midnight was dangerous territory, and we were usually home by then.

I'm not saying we were normal.  But it doesn't seem to me that everyone stayed up all night every night like the kids I know.  Nobody seems to ever sleep now.  I get up in the morning and check emails, and the inbox is full of stuff from three a.m.  Always.

I've rebelled against many things, but not the comfort of going to bed.  I remember being sent to bed while the adults talked.  I'd leave my door open so I could hear them in our small house, the low buzz of human voices as I tried to listen safely snuggled up, falling deeper, deeper. . . deeper. . . .

I didn't shower yesterday.  I didn't leave the house for more than an hour and a half to run some errands.  The sky is bright and the light crystalline and the air cold so that the wind cuts through your clothing.  It was good to sit inside and read and watch the first full football game of the year.  I normally can't watch them for all the commercials and jock commentators, but the San Francisco/New Orleans game was a miracle.  Even the commentators were good.  The game took me back to something, to some better time.  It merged past and present as good things should.  It was perfect.

After that, I thought to watch the Denver/New England game, but the commentators put me off from the start.  The redneck coach's cadence of Phil Simms shallow observations made it seem like NASCAR.  I had wanted to watch Tebow and God make another miracle, but somewhere in the first half some miscreant Christian organization exploited a group of kids by having them read some biblical verse in a commercial version of Jesus Camp, and I had to shut it off.  I kept wondering how people would react if Jews and Moslems and Buddhists and the Moonies started doing the same thing.

This morning I feel greasy and want a shower, but the gym doesn't open until noon, so I will probably wait until after my workout to do that.  I feel like Drug Skinny's photograph.  But I've just remembered that the factory is closed Monday for MLK Day, so I have a reprieve, and extra day of being just me.  Oooo.  I like that.